Re: Off Topic: Basic Assumptions

[Margaret Tarbet <tarbet@swaa.com>]

Further examples of pathological greed:

Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
Section: International News
Date: February 19, 1999, Friday, BC Cycle 13:19 Central European
Time 
Length: 1276 words
Copyright: Copyright 1999 Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
Headline: RPT FEATURE: Slave labour not uncommon in richest country
on Earth
Byline: By Holger Schmale, dpa
 
 WASHINGTON-- Maria is about 60 years old and comes from Brazil. The
last 19 years she has lived in a roomy villa in the affluent
Washington D.C. suburb Chevy Chase - and was treated like a slave.
All that time, Maria was working as a maid for a Brazilian
businessman and his family. They beat her, provided bad food, forced
her to wear shabby clothes and refused to let her off the property. 

Yeshehareg is from Ethiopia. A compatriot who was working at the
headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) brought her to
Washington D.C. eight years ago to work as his maid. He forced her
to work seven days a week, isolated her from other Ethiopians by
threatening her with violence should she contact them, and when she
complained, he beat her. Her salary: 3 cents an hour. 

Another Maria, from the Philippines, found her way to Washington
three years ago with the help of a friend. She was supposed to work
as nanny for a family of Filipino diplomats, earning 20 dollars for
a 40 hour week. The family forced her to work a 116-hour week and
paid her 1.70 dollars an hour. 

These are just three examples of modern slavery in the United
States, as investigated and uncovered by the Washington Post. 

According to various civil rights organisations, churches and
lawyers, such cases are not rare. Each year, thanks to a special
Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) regulation some 3,800
domestic servants are brought into the United States every year by
diplomats and employees of organisations like the World Bank and
IMF. Many of these servants are treated well by their employers.
Others are not. 

What they all have in common is that they are totally dependent on
their employers, to whom their own visas and work permits are tied.
So if they ever manage to complain to the police such people are
almost always deported. 

The IMF and World Bank pretend to be helpless: They can only request
that their employees treat and pay their servants properly, but have
no way of checking whether such requests are met. The same is also
true - only more so - of diplomats, who are immune from prosecution
in their host country, regardless of the charges. 

But the problem of slave labour is by no means limited to the cities
of Washington and New York, home to the IMF, the World Bank, the
United Nations and numerous embassies. Scandals about abused
domestic servants regularly make the newspaper headlines in the
United States. 

In Los Angeles, police released 70 Thai women, who were chained up
and forced to work in a sweatshop where they made clothes. 

In New York, authorities arrested the ringleaders of a gang that
imprisoned 60 deaf and dumb [sic] Mexicans in two apartments only
letting them out to go and beg for money. 

In Florida, authorities broke up a Mexican gang that used false
promises to lure some 20 young Mexican women to the United States,
where they were put to work as prostitutes in migrant worker camps. 
Some of the women were just 14. They were treated like slaves, raped
and beaten. 

The United States has to banish such cases of modern slavery from
the front pages of the newspapers and from the history books,
Attorney General Janet Reno said after the scandal became public. 
[what, by hiding them maybe?  forbidding investigation?]

But such appeals are not much good. Only recently, attorneys have
filed lawsuits claiming exploitation against leading clothes
manufacturers such as Tommy Hilfinger, Gap and Oshkosh and leading
U.S. department stores. 

The attorneys are acting on behalf of 50,000 men and women from
China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Thailand who are forced to
work 70 hours a week in crowded camps set up on the Mariana Islands,
a U.S. dependency in the Pacific. 

Protests against such production methods are increasing in the
United States. Students at George Washington University in
Washington D.C. and Duke University in North Carolina recently
protested that the colleges business partners did not always reveal
where the popular T-shirts and baseball caps bearing the
universities' seals are made. 

"But that's important to know, so we can be sure that no one is
exploited in the name of our university," said Kyle Crafton, who
helped organise the protests. Reno takes a similar view and has set
up a task force to focus on the issue of modern day slave labour. 

dpa ma jp